1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to accounting systems and, more particularly, to a system and method for revenue and expense realignment.
2. Background Information
Accounting within a business entity of any appreciable size is a complex operation. The business entity typically maintains a general ledger showing all of the transactions conducted by the various organizational units of the business enterprise. One or more revenue sources, which may be divisions, sales offices, individual salesmen, etc., generate revenue transactions that are stored within the general ledger. Similarly, one or more expense sources generate expense transactions showing various expenses related to the business enterprise. Typically, the plurality of revenue and/or expense transactions is are stored within the general ledger as individual entries. A noted problem with conventional business accounting systems is that there exists no easy technique for retrieving certain types of information from the general ledger. Individual entries within the general ledger may be retrieved, however, assimilating the data into a meaningful representation to answer common accounting and/or business-related questions may be complicated and/or impossible, depending upon at what granularity the revenue and expense sources output transactions.
A further noted disadvantage of conventional accounting systems is that data may be output from the various revenue and/or expense sources utilizing levels of granularity different than what is desired by users of the accounting system. For example, revenue may be output on a per product basis; however, the business entity may desire to a apportion the revenue from a particular product among several constituent elements of the business entity, e.g., between two divisions and/or between two salespeople. To track such information, the business entity may be required to keep multiple sets of books and associated revenue/expense sources for each level of granularity at which information may be desired. Such a redundant system introduces obvious cost increases with a concomitant increase in problems of data security and consistency. Additionally, users of the general ledger are typically limited by the static configuration of the revenue/expense sources and the type of information that they export.